


When All the World's Asleep

by TheRealSokka



Series: Growing [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, but seriously; a lot of hurt, good moments, my favourite tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27937812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRealSokka/pseuds/TheRealSokka
Summary: After what happened to Hopper in the mall, El tries her best to move on. To find some good moments in their new home.(Companion piece to "There are Times", told from El's POV)
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Joyce Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Series: Growing [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1465525
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	When All the World's Asleep

It’s hard.

It’s hard for El to leave her home behind. To see the ‘ _Leaving Hawkins’_ -sign pass by the car window in a flash, her eyes too watery to make out the letters. To see it all disappear behind her. The empty cabin in the woods. The basement and the laughter and the sad eyes of Mike as he looks after her. The colourful mall that used to excite her, but now only holds bad memories. Leaving it all feels wrong, like a part of her is tearing away from herself to stay. Before, this place hurt her because it made her face her memories every day, but now it somehow hurts worse leaving them behind. It’s hard.

It’s harder to try and move on. Joyce tells her they have to; it’s what Jim would have wanted. Her voice catches on his name, like it always does. It’s hard for her, too. But she tries, for El and for Will and for Jonathan, so El tries to try, too. She owes her that. She owes _him_ that.

Sometimes she thinks moving on might work.

Most of the time, though, she knows that it isn’t. She sees it in the way Joyce will sometimes stop in the middle of saying something to stare into nothing for a few seconds, her expression starting to morph into something sad, before snapping back. She hears it in Will’s muffled cries at night when he twists and turns on the other side of their room, still hunted by the monster. She feels it in the complete _helplessness_ when she lies awake listening to it; when she wants to reach out to either of them, but the movement doesn’t make it past a tentative thought in her head.

No one ever says it, but they know and she knows that all of this is her fault. If she hadn’t let herself get bitten, she would still have had her powers and Jim wouldn’t have had to go down to stop the gate machine. If it weren’t for her, the gate would never have existed in the first place. The monster wouldn’t have come to Hawkins. Will would never have gone missing. She wouldn’t have ruined everybody’s lives.

Jim would still be alive.

Maybe he still is, El thinks. Nobody saw what happened. They haven’t found a body, so maybe he somehow, somewhere, survived and he just can’t get back. Maybe he’s out there right now, trying to find a way back. Maybe if she keeps turning on static on the radio and trying to slip into the In-Between to look, she’ll eventually find him. Maybe he could come live with them. Maybe.

At the beginning, El can’t even imagine any other outcome. It is impossible to think that Jim could just be _gone_. Of course that couldn’t have happened. She’ll find him, like she found Will before. She can do it.

That certainty has turned into a _maybe_ in the weeks since they have moved, growing weaker with every day that her powers did not come back. And now, with every turn of the radio dial and every hour where static remains only static with no voices emerging from it, even that _maybe_ has started to fade. Everything – Jim, the lab, the monsters, her friends, her powers – is starting to feel like a different life to El. It feels like it’s been ages since that last day in the Byers’ house, even though it has only been 34 days. 65 days since she has seen Jim for the last time. In this new home in this big city, there is nothing that could remind her of him; and yet somehow everything does. The thought of a reality without him is suddenly painfully real.

Joyce often asks her if she’s alright in those first few days in the new flat. There’s no resentment in her face, just sorrow, and somehow that stings worse. El deserves to be yelled at, at least. But none of the Byers ever yell at her: Joyce always hugs her for longer than necessary every morning. Jonathan gives her a quick smile whenever her eyes flick up to meet his. Will carries a pile of her newly bought school utensils into their room one day and tries to explain what she’ll need everything for. It makes El want to scream.

Mostly it is Mike who keeps her sane during that time. He calls her almost every day; asking how she’s doing and talking about what’s happening in Hawkins. “I’d call more often, but mom doesn’t let me. ‘It’s a waste of money, Michael.’ As if she doesn’t hog the stupid thing,” he tells her. El can practically see him making a face on the other end, and the thought makes her smile. Mike has that effect. He loves her. She knows that he is not judging her, and for some reason she can accept that easier coming from him than from the Byers.

It’s not that they don’t try for normality. Though, El isn’t even sure what that means at this point. For a few short, happy months, _normal_ had meant waking up in a small, one bed room in a cabin in the woods. Finding Jim in the kitchen making eggos, or a note from him why he’d had to leave again. Mike coming over during the afternoon to read comics and listen to music. At night when she lay in bed, the wind would often howl around the cabin and hiss through the thin wooden planks. Here, she can’t hear the wind. She misses it. And the music.

For the Byers, _normal_ means breakfast together, Joyce and Jonathan brooding over papers and Will spending most of his time reading, though rarely the same stuff as the others. They talk, go out shopping and plan for school that is coming up. Sometimes they argue. Never very badly, but Joyce does get a hard look in her eyes when Jonathan suggests she should stay home for a while instead of working late shifts. Hours later, one of them will usually go into the other’s room with a hot cup of coffee and an apology, and the argument is over. Normal.

El isn’t sure where she fits into their _normal_. Maybe she doesn’t. That realization stings; a sharp ache in her chest that somehow only grows when they try to involve her. But every day, her guilt keeps staring her in the face: from the dark circles under Joyce’s eyes, to the infuriatingly silent radio, to the mornings after another nightmare when she desperately tries to catch Will’s eyes but he won’t meet hers. When he does, his face is locked, guarded. This time, the ache in her chest is dull, laden with the knowledge that she is responsible for that look, too.

She flees into her conversations with Mike. Starts waiting by the phone minutes before she knows he’ll call. It’s good to hear his voice; a last trace of her old _normal_. She tells him that once; admits just how much she misses him. Mike tells her that it’s the same for him. And that he loves her. That most of all. El feels herself smile as she nods, even though he obviously can’t see that. She remembers to say, “I love you, too,” back.

When she looks up, she sees Will standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her with an odd look on his face. Then he turns around and vanishes. He doesn’t ever bring it up. It’s just another thing they don’t talk about. Like the nightmares.

Moving on also entails her starting school, like they had planned. It comes abruptly, suddenly, without any real time to prepare. Back in Hawkins, Nancy and Mike had taken turns tutoring her over the summer, so that she’d be ready when her friends started high school. Now, one Monday, that day is unceremoniously there and she finds herself sat in the car with Joyce and Will, both looking anxious as they pull up in front of the school. El feels numb. School had excited her so much before the summer, but now she just can’t really see the point anymore.

“You’re going to be alright,” Joyce says – if to them or to herself is not entirely clear.

El doesn’t answer. Will nods too quickly.

Joyce turns around in her seat to be able to look at both of them. Her expression is reassuring, yet also pleading. “You will. Just – look out for each other, okay?”

El remembers Mike telling her that school had been hard for Will. Something to do with the boy whose arm she broke when she first met them, and others like him. Maybe that’s why Joyce is concerned. She meets Will’s eyes and sees nervousness – and the same look of concern as his mother’s. Directed at her.

He shouldn’t be worrying. Not about her. _Fine_ , El thinks stubbornly. If they insist on caring for her, even if it’s just out of pity, she’ll try to do the same for them. ‘Look out for each other’, Joyce said. She can do that.

* * *

School is awful. It smells of a hundred smells that El can’t even identify, mixing in the hallways into one big stink that makes just breathing difficult. The teachers don’t smile, like Mr. Clark, and don’t explain things as well as Nancy. The other students are – a lot. There are so many of them; an endless sea of faces, and none of them looks at her like Mike does, or grins like Dustin, or scowls like Max.

Even more so than when she escaped the lab for the first time, El feels like she doesn’t belong. Even with all the preparation, she has no idea what to do here, how she should act or where she should go and she ends up pretty much just copying whatever Will does. That means staying quiet and keeping to the sides. Will always tries to stay out of others’ way and avoids big lumps of people, for which El is thankful. The small circle of people that make sense around her is suddenly gone, replaced by hundreds more faces, none of which really looks at her.

Some do. And they laugh. El hears them on her second day, just as she leaves her first, disastrous algebra lesson: The small group of girls are standing by the door, looking pretty. When she comes out, she immediately senses their attention turning to her. One of them, a blonde, snickers and points at her. She’s talking to her friends, but El can hear every word: “Are you seeing _that_? She looks like she’s fallen in a paint store and rolled around in it!” Laughter. “I wouldn’t even put that in my trash.”

El looks down at herself. She’s wearing the pretty dress of many colours that Max gave her before they left. She loved it from the first second, and Max said she looked ‘brilliant’. It’s one of the few light spots that El remembers after the mall; one of the few where she remembers feeling happy. When she looks back up, it is to glare at the girls. There is hot, furious anger suddenly boiling hot in her stomach. Her hands at her sides clench into fists.

Another’s hand closes around her arm. She looks up to see Will, looking wary and shaking his head insistently. Again there is that concern. _Why?_ He has barely said a word to her since they moved. What’s it to him that she suddenly wants to hurt these girls she’s never met before?

She refuses to step away. But before she can take a step forward instead, Will walks in between them and steers her down the hallway, gently but insistent. “Ignore them.” he pleads, quietly so that only she can hear.

“Mouthbreathers!” bursts from her lips, not quite so quietly. But his apparent concern manages to make her feel better than her boiling anger and the want to hurt does, so something in her gives in. Still, the rest of the day is bad.

Being around Will is strange. It’s only now, now that he’s the only familiar face around her for most of the day, that El realizes she doesn’t really know anything about him. She knows he has nightmares. She knows he is still struggling with the Upside Down. She knows that he is good at drawing, even though he doesn’t do it anymore.

She didn’t know that he is more afraid of school than she is. She didn’t know that he likes listening to music and often turns it up to full blast when he thinks nobody is home. She didn’t know that his eyes sometimes change colour in a certain light, from a light green to a darker, almost brown shade of hazel. She didn’t know how much he misses home – how much he misses Mike – until that expression when he was looking at her holding the phone receiver. All that she learns in the first three days, and it still feels like far too little.

Most of all, though, she didn’t know how rarely he would talk with her.

It’s not that he avoids her, she realizes after a while; rather, it’s just how he is. His quietness is so different from Mike, and after him it feels off to not constantly be talked to. By herself, El doesn’t say much either and sometimes half a school day can pass by without either of them starting a conversation. She isn’t sure if she’s okay with that or not. Everything she’s learned about society so far since she escaped from the lab tells her that this is wrong. It’s not how things are supposed to work. If you’re friendly with someone, you should talk, often and always. With Mike, that has never been a problem. He has an energetic way of talking that always just pulled her in and along. Will doesn’t, and his quiet presence is so vastly different that it is eerily noticeable from the first moment they step through the school gates.

But in these new, bad surroundings, it becomes almost like an anchor for El. Something steady to hold onto. And she needs that, badly.

She feels so tired, every day more so as the week drags on. She can’t sleep well. Her bed is not the hard mattress from the cabin, nor the cramped space of the blanket fort. It’s foreign. Her thoughts race when she closes her eyes, and when she does manage to fall asleep she has nightmares. _A_ nightmare.

Jim sits with her in the mall. His eyes are sad when he looks at her and his tone brooks no argument. “I have to keep you save.” El nods to say that she understands. She always nods, and she always yells at herself not to. To go and stop him, somehow. But then he leaves, and she doesn’t see him again, and then the ground shakes, and then there’s Joyce looking at her, knowing. That’s usually when she wakes up. Sometimes Joyce yells at her in the dream – that _it’s all her fault_ –, and when her eyes fly open she needs a moment to convince herself that it _was_ just a dream and that Joyce hasn’t actually done that. Yet.

* * *

Things somehow settle into a routine. School doesn’t become any better, but when it all gets too much El can usually make it to Will in time and start talking about something or nothing to distract herself. Or, more often, they just sit together and she allows the silence to abate her growing frustration. It’s a little strange how often it manages to do just that. El isn’t sure if Will understands what is going on in those moments, but there are times when hazel eyes find hers and it feels like he knows. The thought of just how much he sees makes El uneasy, but she depends on those moments too much to tell him to stop.

Usually. At the start of the second week, Will isn’t there for her first lesson and the teacher decides to pick her to explain an equation on the board. El thought she understood it before, but it turns out that she didn’t and now everyone is looking at her and when the teacher asks her another question, she says something nasty. She can’t even remember what it was exactly. It must have been bad, though: she ends up with detention.

All she knew of detention before today was that her Mike and her friends always complained about it. Most of all, she finds it to be incredibly boring. She just has to sit in an empty classroom, with a disinterested teacher sitting at the front reading a book. He only briefly glanced up when she entered, informing her that she could use the time productively and do some homework. That would have at least given her something to do, but without her books she can’t do anything other than Math, and those tasks are all about the stupid equation that she couldn’t explain. There aren’t even any other students here that she could try to talk to. So all that she can really do is sulk and be angry for hours.

Her friend picks her up at the end of the school day. At this point, El’s anger has dried up and hardened solid. She’s not even sure anymore who she’s angry at: the teacher, the school or herself. A small, conscious part of her knows that this isn’t good, that it’s like the thin crust forming over a volcano, just ready to explode again. But at the same time that small part is afraid of what will happen if she allows the anger to melt. As a result, all of it is still there now, and hours of detention have completely failed to make it go away.

The look of concerned hazel eyes accomplish it in a heartbeat. Will’s are so much like his mother’s, and as he enters the room and they look at each other, her anger yelps and starts to shrink into itself. The space where it used to be is immediately taken up by guilt. All El can suddenly think of is Joyce looking at her with complete disappointment. Her eyes drop and she stares at her feet. She can’t think of anything to say.

Will walks over to her, his face creased with worry. “I’m so sorry, El. Mr Timmons only just told me you got detention. What happened?”

“Said something stupid,” she mumbles defensively.

The Byers-look-of-concern is scanning over her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” she bursts out. “I said _I_ did something stupid, alright? My fault. You don’t have to worry about me or…or act like you owe me anything!”

“Hey! No reason to yell, young lady.” the teacher calls over, looking up from his book.

Will frowns. His hands hover uncertainly in mid-air, halfway between reaching out to her and falling back to his sides. His entire being spells confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re all so nice to me! Even when I’ve done everything wrong! You act like I belong. I don’t belong with you. I don’t belong here.” She gestures around the school.

Will stares at her. There’s a too long silence growing and El resists the impulse to tell him to yell at her already. Somebody has to.

Then he asks, “…in detention?”

Now it’s El’s turn to stare at him. Her face suddenly can’t decide if it wants to frown or laugh. Was that a joke? The slight twitch in Will’s mouth says that it was. El doesn’t want to smile now, though. She doesn’t. Before she can, she protests, “That’s not what I meant.”

“Good, cause that’s a bad excuse either way. Teachers don’t like it when you argue about detention. Dustin tried that once, and he just instantly got another one.”

El grimaces, frustrated. “No. You don’t understand what I mean.”

Will’s expression turns serious at that – and El sees a shard of pain there as well. She’s seen it before. Sometimes from Will, but mostly from her own mirror. He shakes his head: “No, I do. Trust me.” There’s a pause, during which Will fidgets nervously with the hem of his shirt. “But…look, Jon’s always told me _‘You’re not alone here, so don’t act like you are.’_ That’s what I’m trying to say, I guess.”

“But – you don’t have to do that. I said you don’t owe me anything.”

“I do owe you; a lot!” he protests.

“No, you don’t. Everything that happened was my…”

“My life, for one,” Will cuts her short. He never does that, so it catches El off guard. He immediately continues, “But it’s not even about that. This has nothing to do with anybody owing anybody anything. I’m pretty sure mom already told you, but you have a place with us. If you want to.”

“But…”

“I’m gonna talk to the teacher,” he interrupts her (again!). “So we can leave. Mom will worry if we’re late.” With a determined look on his face he turns away and walks to the front.

El stares after him. She feels like she is thirteen again and has just escaped the lab, because nothing makes sense and she doesn’t know any words. Why is he arguing in her defence more than she herself does? Mike would do that, because Mike loves her, but he’s not Mike. They’re friends, yes, but she can count the number of times she’s talked with Will back in Hawkins on one hand. He doesn’t even really know her.

Why is she trying so hard to push him away, then? She _does_ want to be a part of the Byers’ family, so badly. It’s just… El shakes her head. It’s just that she knows that she can’t. This – her outburst and detention – just proves it. She can’t bear the thought of going home to face Joyce and admit that she already got into trouble. It’s only her second week of school, and already it’s starting to come apart.

“You can go. But your sister had better calm down, you know, or I’ll end up seeing her here a lot more often than either of us would like.”

The teacher’s voice is measured, drifting into her awareness as innocently as bike wheels over a forest road. Still, El’s head snaps up so fast that she nearly breaks her neck. In the same second Will turns around to her, looking uncertain, and as their eyes meet El knows he has caught on the same little word as her. _Sister_.

Something passes between them in that short moment, even though El can’t pin down what it is. It lasts just long enough to be probably slightly weird for the teacher, before Will nods and answers, “We’ll work on it. It won’t happen again, sir.”

They don’t talk about it. Another silence stretches out and carries them all the way out the building and to the school gate. El isn’t sure of what to say and Will just stays silent, glancing at her occasionally. Does he know what she’s thinking? She herself doesn’t really know. She needs time to process everything.

But then, when they have just reached the bus stop, her thoughts are once again overtaken with fear of what will happen once they get home. Abruptly, she turns to him. “Will…”

“Not a word to mom. I know,” comes the instant reply. “We shouldn’t worry her.” Spontaneously, he reaches out to squeeze her hand – again, a gesture so similar to Mike. Though he doesn’t say anything else, El hears the unspoken ‘ _You’re not alone._ ’ that comes with the gesture.

In that moment, she believes him. Earnestly. She wishes she could squeeze ‘ _Thank you._ ’ back.

* * *

The pretty girls at school ignore her after a while. So do most of the teachers. By the end of the second week, El is starting to catch up to some of the things they’re writing on their boards, and it feels good to complete some of her homework without having to ask Will about everything. In the mornings, the smell of burnt eggo now joins that of burnt bacon, and El eagerly tears into them under the amused eyes of Joyce. Those are good moments, and on some days they make her think that she might be okay, after all.

She borrows one of Joyce’s old books and starts reading in her free time, using the complicated and sometimes old-timey sentences to practise. She sometimes turns on the radio, not to listen to static but to the actual music that’s playing. One afternoon an especially rhythmic song has her spontaneously break into dance and she turns up the volume to whirl through the living room. Only after a minute does she remember that Will is trying to do his homework in the neighbouring room. She cracks open his door to apologize and finds his head bobbing along to the music while he’s writing in his notebook. She closes the door again with a smile.

But then those moments are often followed by days where everything seems to fall apart. It doesn’t; not physically. Sometimes the exact same things happen on bad days as on good days, but they are still bad days. El finds herself staring into nothing when sitting in their classroom, her thoughts having wandered back to Hawkins. When asked to say something, her mind is just empty, or filled so much with guilt and anger that nothing else has space. She snaps at her classmates, the teacher, even Will, once. He flinches back as if she’d physically hit him. This time, he doesn’t ask her what’s wrong, just waits the rest of the day for her to calm down. Or maybe to talk about it.

But El won’t talk about it. Can’t. She wouldn’t know how to: How can she explain why she feels this way when she doesn’t understand it herself? On good days she’s well aware that her outbursts have no basis, which only frustrates her more, which ends up making her more angry at herself.

She doesn’t even mention it to Mike. Despite everything, their phone calls have continued nearly unchanged. He still asks her how she’s doing, gives her tips for school and tells stories of what is going on back home; unaware of the storm that is brewing on the other end of the line. And El clings to that normality like a life line. For the first time, she finds herself lying to Mike. _Yes, of course she’s fine. School is tough, but she’s fine_.

It’s not fine. The third week of school, she barely avoids a second detention. It’s only thanks to Will’s quick reaction and a hastily uttered _“Sorry; she’s nauseous.”_ that she ends up outside in the schoolyard instead of in the room with the bored teacher and his book. Will steers her to a bench and sits down next to her. He runs his fingers through her hair and, one by one, threads out the pieces of gum that someone sitting behind her has thrown there. Her entire head feels sticky.

El is fuming. “If I catch those…those…”

“Assholes,” Will supplies.

“Assholes!” El agrees. It feels good to yell that word out, so she adds a few more: “Mouthbreathers! Morons!”

“Imbeciles,” Will contributes a new one that she didn’t know yet, and she promptly adds that to the list, yelling it across the empty schoolyard. Her throat feels hoarse, but it’s not really a bad feeling. And why is Will suddenly grinning like that? Why is she returning the grin? El decides that she doesn’t care. She has to cover her mouth to stifle her sudden fit of giggles. Will shakes his head, still grinning, and chucks another dried piece of gum over his shoulder.

It’s a good moment.

One morning, El almost punches the milkman. He’s an elderly man who’s been showing up at their doorstep since their first week here and usually strikes up a conversation, no matter if El returns the favour or not. This time he’s made a comment about how beautiful the weather is or something, and something inside her just snaps. She only realizes what she’s doing when her hand is already raised and balled into a fist, and it’s all she can do to turn away from the actually-quite-nice-man and hit the doorframe, instead.

The milkman, having looked up at the sky, walks away unawares, whistling a tune. Leaving El petrified in the door, trying to work out what is wrong with her. She doesn’t know where that sudden anger has come from, or where it’s gone, but from then on she is always afraid that it’ll come back just as suddenly. For now, she just feels ashamed of herself.

One night the nightmares become worse than usual. When El jolts awake in the dark, everything seems to constrict around her and she can’t breathe. In panic, her hands are clawing at her throat. She must black out for a while, because when she comes back to she finds that her feet have carried her out of the apartment and she is leaning against a wall in the grimy backyard, struggling to get air into her lungs. The autumn night air is warm against her skin, but her stomach feels like it contains a block of solid ice. She doubles over and retches.

She feels sick. No, not sick. ‘ _Festering’_. They learned that in Biology. It’s a kind of sick, but it just gets worse and worse and worse. That’s what she feels like. She always feels angry, and when she doesn’t she feels like crying. There are times when it brightens up for a few moments, when she can laugh, but they’re always gone before she can hold on to them.

She is broken, isn’t she?

El doesn’t let herself cry now, because that would confirm it. Her eyes turn to the gate that leads to the main street. Her thoughts follow along, without her consent. It would be easy right now to just continue walking; out that gate, along the street and then – she doesn’t know. Just away. She doesn’t belong here, doesn’t belong with this family; she is only going to ruin everything for everybody. Again. It would be best for everyone if she just left.

She’s about to take the first step when, above her, a light flickers to life up in the apartment building. It might be their flat or not, El isn’t sure. She stares at it for a long moment. It doesn’t go out again. Someone else who can’t sleep.

_You’re not alone._

She remembers a hand sneaking into her own, pulling her along.

After a long moment, she turns around and heads back into the building. The stairwell is eerily quiet and she flinches when they door of their apartment creaks as she slides it open. She hadn’t even properly closed it. If a burglar had gotten in…

She notices that the lights in the kitchen are on. Then a silhouette steps into the hallway a few feet away from her, stopping abruptly when they see El. She startles for the second time and takes a few quick steps away, her body entering its fight-or-flight mode, when Joyce’s voice says, “…El? What are you doing up, sweetie?”

The lights are turned on and El can see her worried eyes, with the dark circles underneath. “I – couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Oh. Me neither.” Joyce replies. She regards her with that look; the look that El knows from Will. The one that suggests that he understands, even though they haven’t even acknowledged there’s a problem. It’s the same look now. She realizes that Joyce must have nightmares, too.

They end up sitting around the kitchen table, El with a cup of cocoa, Joyce with tea. The drink warms her up from inside, fighting the chill under her skin that has been there since she woke up. Joyce is giving her a tired smile, with just a hint of worry at the corners, and El barely succeeds in smiling back. Suddenly this seems familiar, like she has been here before. Like she is thirteen again, sitting in a bath tub, and Joyce is there promising her that she won’t be alone. So much of El’s idea of ‘home’ is that look. She suddenly feels very stupid, and ashamed of what she was considering doing earlier.

“I dreamt of Jim.” Joyce starts after a long silence.

El just nods. Her throat feels dry, and she doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“We were driving home from the hospital and he just – kept telling bad jokes the entire way. I think it was after another check-up session, so he wanted to cheer Will up, but Will and I were just rolling our eyes. They were _really_ bad. So eventually, he just stopped the car in the middle of the road and got out, pretending that he was offended and wanted to walk the entire way back to Hawkins…” She breaks off, with a sad smile on her lips. “That’s when I woke up. And then I remembered he is gone. But…for a moment that was a really good memory. It’s the first time I’ve not dreamt of the mall. I think it’s…it’s important to remember those moments, too, don’t you think?”

“Hmhm.” El mutters. Joyce is becoming blurry in her vision; the tears she hasn’t cried in weeks now seemingly coming back to her, wanting out all at once. She sniffs, wiping her eyes, and nods more forcefully. “Good moments. I’m – trying to remember, too.”

The look on Joyce’s face is impossibly fragile. “Can I hug you?”

El doesn’t manage a response, just a wet sniffle, but that’s enough and a second later she is crying onto Joyce’s shoulder. She would be ashamed of ruining her pyjamas with her tears, but she thinks Joyce is crying, too, and somehow that makes it okay. She mutters comforting nothings at El’s back; or maybe they’re somethings and El is just too far gone to make sense of them. She doesn’t want to think about it, either. She just clings onto the hug until all her tears are gone.

She has learned not to cry early on. The men at the lab didn’t like it if she cried; they would make her do tests a second time, or, worse, put her back into that small, empty room where the walls closed in on her and she couldn’t breathe. So crying was bad. At the time that logic made sense to her: if she did something and they put her in the room, it had to be bad. But since then she has seen Mike cry, and Will, and Joyce; even Jim. And she has worked out her own rules: if they do something, it’s okay – no matter what the people at the lab might have said. It’s a childish view and she knows it, but in principle it still holds true.

“Thank you.” she manages, pulling away a bit. She doesn’t just mean the hug, or the crying, but everything.

“Not for that.” Joyce reluctantly pulls away, too. “El? I know Will hates it when I say this, but…you can talk to me...”

“I wanted to run away.” El blurts out.

She ends up telling her everything; about the school and the nightmares; the out-of-place feeling and the detention; the milkman and the gate out of the yard. Once she starts, she finds she is unable to stop, and Joyce doesn’t interrupt her, either. They move from the table to the couch after a while. The clock on the wall passes four in the morning and El can feel her eyes grow heavy, but still she tries to explain, and to listen to what Joyce is telling her in return. In some cases it is an almost word-for-word repetition of what Will said: _It’s not about owing somebody anything. It’s about remembering, but trying to move on. You have a place here, if you want to_. El listens and nods, and for the first time since moving here they are not hollow gestures. Sitting on the couch with Joyce, with the cocoa and her words warming her up inside, she really does feel home.

When El blinks awake, the first thing she notices is that she’s still on the couch. Then she notices the smell of bacon. She sits up groggily, rubbing her eyes, and seed Joyce still asleep in the armchair across from her. Then she spies Will and Jonathan by the stove, making breakfast. It smells so good that El can’t help but make a happy sigh.

They both turn around. Jon gives her a smile. Will gives her a curious _Why did you sleep on the couch?-_ look, before that, too, morphs into a hesitant smile. “Good morning.”

“What time is it?” El mutters, getting to her feet.

Jonathan answers, “10am. You slept in.” He expertly flips a pancake and sprinkles some sugar on top.

“Long night?” Will asks her. El hears the unspoken _Nightmares?_ in his question, and sees the likewise silent _Are you okay?_ in his expression.

There is that warmth again, spreading in El’s chest. She remembers how guilty that concerned look made her feel before. Somehow, coming from Will now, it’s okay. She makes a gesture that is halfway between a shrug and a nod and punctuates it with a small smile, hoping that can answer all three of his questions.

Maybe that is too much information to put into one gesture, because Will only looks confused. He opens his mouth to say something, but in that moment there is a sudden rustle of blankets and Joyce shoots up from her armchair. Whereas El woke up feeling tired but also strangely relaxed, her expression cannot be described as relaxed by any stretch. Joyce’s eyes flick from her to the two boys by the stove. “What time is it?!” she demands.

Jonathan raises his hands in a well-practised, placating gesture. “Mom, relax. It’s Sunday.”

“Oh.” Joyce says, perplexed.

They all look at each other. Then Jon and Will burst into laughter. El can’t help it, she has to giggle, too. Joyce tries to look cross for a few seconds, but it doesn’t quite work. She stubbornly nudges her sons out of the way and tries to take over at the stove, prompting worried protests from Jon. Will chuckles. His eyes find El’s, and now he is smiling, too. “Good morning.” he says.

“Good morning.” she says back.

Maybe she _can_ hold on to this good moment. And if she can’t – they can repeat it tomorrow, can’t they?


End file.
